A gray-bearded man with sunken eyes befitting his constant state of bereavement, he specialized in picking pockets at places of mourning. One minute he’d be keening beside you; the next, he’d be gone and so would your wallet, intensifying the weeping and wailing over fresh loss.

And don’t forget Poodle Murphy, a slim man with the weary look of a beleaguered clerk, but perhaps the finest pickpocket in the country. Among his gifts was the ability to grow a full red beard quickly — a fortuitous talent for someone often on the lam.

There was lanky Banjo Pete Ellis, who gave up minstrelsy to star instead as a bank burglar and all-around sneak. And Little Annie Reilly, a house servant adept at flattering the lady of the house, fussing over the children and vanishing with all the jewelry. And Lord Courtney — a.k.a. Lord Beresford, a.k.a. Sir Harry Vane of Her Majesty’s Lights — a suave British commoner who liked to swindle money from the wealthy belles he bedazzled. Introducing himself to Baltimore society as an officer of the Royal Navy, he so charmed its women that they cut the buttons from his fake uniform to cherish as relics of the empire.

This fraudulent nobleman, along with many other underworld denizens of late-19th-century New York — the pickpockets and hotel thieves, the forgers and confidence men — would surely be forgotten today, their distinctive faces lost to cruel time, were it not for a New York police official whose legacy straddles fame and infamy: the singular and supremely confident Inspector Thomas F. Byrnes.

Byrnes — a recurring character in the new TV series “The Alienist,” based on the novel by Caleb Carr — was the best-known policeman of his era, and is remembered now as the complicated father of the modern Detective Bureau, instilling a professional rigor in Gotham’s slovenly ranks. On the flip side of judgment’s ledger, he believed that criminals had no civil rights, considered torture to be just another investigative tool, and somehow managed to become wealthy on a civil servant’s modest salary.

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Inspector Thomas F. Byrnes, at right, observes the preparation of George Mason, a bank robber, for his Rogues' Gallery portrait.CreditMuseum of the City of New York

Byrnes is perhaps most famous for enhancing and popularizing what came to be known as the Rogues’ Gallery: a collection of hundreds of photographs of criminals, along with detailed descriptions of their looks and habits, which detectives were expected to memorize. Here, for one, is how his fraudulent excellency Lord Courtney was described:

“Slim build. Height, 6 feet 2 inches. Weight, 175 pounds. Dark hair, heavy eyes, bronzed complexion. Has a small, light-colored mustache. Tall, gentlemanly looking man. Looks and assumes the air of an Englishman. Has a poor education, and is a poor writer. A bogus lord, with ‘R.N.’ on his baggage.”

The imitation aristocrat, along with Annie Reilly, Banjo Pete, Poodle and dozens of other lowlifes, lives on in the mug shots and brief biographies contained in “Professional Criminals of America,” a gangland encyclopedia that Byrnes assembled in 1886 and which now resides in the public domain. It is mesmerizing.

Arrayed in rows, the photographs of the distant dead beckon you to imagine their daring, difficult days. Yes, there is that who-me expression to some, that look of just-minding-my-own-business, officer. Their expressions evoke the notorious mantra of the Tammany Hall factotum George Washington Plunkitt: “I seen my opportunities and I took ’em.”

But many of the faces are maps of hard miles: the Irish potato famine and the Civil War, the Bowery dives and the Five Points squalor, the rough childhoods spent hawking matches and squawking the news. Studying these images can be simultaneously unnerving and comforting, because — if you are like me — you begin to detect a family resemblance.

None of the photographs, though, carries the slightest suggestion of gratitude for the man who considered their visages worthy of posterity: the good Inspector Byrnes.

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CreditNew York Public Library

The “big policeman,” as the journalist and social reformer Jacob Riis once called the man, distinguished himself with his immaculate dress, superior investigative skills, and prodigious talent for self-promotion. An Irish immigrant and Civil War veteran, Byrnes joined the New York Police Department as a patrolman in 1863 and — though he was no toady for the powerful Tammany machine — advanced through a corrupt system in which payoffs led to promotions.

His defining moment came in 1878, when he broke the Manhattan Savings Institution case, in which several masked men, led by Jimmy Hope — a prominent member of the Rogues’ Gallery — made off with $2.75 million in securities and cash.

Two years later he became chief of the Detective Bureau, described by The New York Times as “a force of broken-down policemen, holding their places by force of pull, and working, when they worked at all, without system and purpose.”

Managing his bureau with what The Times called a “mailed fist,” Byrnes expanded the detective ranks with bright and hungry officers, who soon learned how to conduct surveillance, gather intelligence, and analyze data. His cultivation of informants in every alley and dive, as well as of reporters at every newspaper, fed his growing reputation as a gifted sleuth who knew the mugs and thugs better than they knew themselves.

A young reporter named Lincoln Steffens — who went on to become a muckraking journalist and author — experienced Byrnes’s omniscient abilities firsthand, after a pickpocket absconded with his weekly pay. Byrnes asked Steffens to describe the envelope, the amount, and the trolley-car lines he frequented, then declared: “I’ll have it for you Monday morning.”

And he did.

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CreditProfessional Criminals of America

‘Known in all the principal cities in the United States’

Harry Busby (‘Williams’) Pickpocket and Shoplifter

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CreditProfessional Criminals of America

‘Cleverest woman in her line’

Annie Reilly (‘Little Annie’) Dishonest Servant

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CreditProfessional Criminals of America

‘Can grow a full red beard quickly’

Terrence Murphy (‘Poodle’) Pickpocket

Byrnes was a forward thinker who relied on backward techniques; he believed that basic rights were suspended in solving — and preventing — a crime. He forbade known criminals from crossing an invisible cordon, or “dead line,” that he established around the financial district, so as to protect the presumably good citizens of Wall Street from ne’er-do-wells. Financiers passed on stock tips to him in gratitude, while trespassing rogues learned that arrest was the least of their worries.

Byrnes was a broad-shouldered bollard of a man, with a cigar forever pointing in accusation from beneath his walrus mustache. In questioning suspects, he could be solicitous or circumspect, and he understood the menace to be had in silence. His donning of black gloves, though, signaled impatience with the pace of interrogation.

“His famous ‘third degree’ was chiefly what he no doubt considered a little wholesome ‘slugging,’” Riis once wrote. “He would beat a thief into telling him what he wanted to know.”

Some abuse, though, was more psychological. Riis once recounted how a murder suspect, locked for days in a basement, was escorted to Byrnes’s office, where the tools of the dastardly deed were displayed on the wall. Byrnes took his time finishing a letter, then gestured for the nervous suspect to sit down, which he did — until realizing that he was now settling into the same bloodstained sofa on which he had killed his victim.

“He sprawled on the floor, a gibbering, horror-stricken wretch, and confessed his sin,” Riis wrote.

Byrnes rose to become police superintendent in 1892, but his timing was infelicitous. Another reform movement was sweeping the city, this one led by the indefatigable Rev. Charles H. Parkhurst, who believed that New York was “rotten with a rottenness which is unspeakable and indescribable” — a rotten rottenness personified, in part, by Superintendent Byrnes, whose virtues he described as “spasmodic.”

The denunciations from the righteous reverend led to state investigative hearings that seemed to support Parkhurst’s description of New York as a “Tammany-debauched town.” While Byrnes remained above the sullying fray of kickbacks and shakedowns, he still had to testify about how the tips and advice of grateful Wall Street friends, including the robber baron Jay Gould, had helped him to amass $350,000 in securities and property.

“Though no personal corruption was demonstrated, the spell was broken,” the historian Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. later wrote. And when an ambitious reformer named Theodore Roosevelt became president of the police board in 1895, he made it clear that there was no longer any room for the “big policeman.”

“We shall not soon have another like him, and that may be both good and bad,” Riis later wrote. “He was unscrupulous, he was for Byrnes — he was a policeman, in short, with all the failings of the trade. But he made the detective service great.”

Byrnes lived well in retirement with his accumulated wealth. He died at 67 in 1910, leaving a wife, five grown daughters — and a gallery peopled with the likes of Funeral Wells, Poodle Murphy and Lord Courtney.

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CreditProfessional Criminals of America

‘Left eye watery; large nose’

John Cannon (‘Old Jack’) Hotel Thief

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CreditProfessional Criminals of America

‘Has an Irish brogue and face’

Edward Tully (‘Broken-Nose Tully’) Pickpocket

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CreditProfessional Criminals of America

‘Right eye gray, left eye out, and replaced at times by a glass one’

Westley Allen (‘Wess. Allen’) Pickpocket, Sneak and Burglar

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CreditProfessional Criminals of America

‘Has followed as a business all professions in the thieving line’

Chas. J. Everhardt (‘Marsh Market Jake’) Sneak and Forger

His collection of mug shots wasn’t the first of its kind. As early as 1857 in New York, for example, a Times article was taking note of a nascent police gallery of daguerreotype portraits that included “likenesses of well-authenticated culprits, male and female. No portrait is taken unless the party is well-known to the police as an old and hardened offender.”

Still, Byrnes is generally credited with elevating the practice. He combined the photographs with thorough criminal backgrounds, and he expected his detectives to know by heart the telltale physiognomy of each nefarious character.

Detectives needed to remember that the burglar William O’Brien, alias Billy Porter, alias Morton, had “a fine set of teeth.” Or that the tattoos of Billy Forrester, a.k.a. Conrad Foltz, included the goddess of liberty on his right arm; an eagle, flag and anchor on his left hand; an Indian queen sitting on an eagle’s back on his left leg; the United States coat of arms on his left arm; and a full-rigged ship on his breast. Oh, and he had a tooth missing: upper jaw, left side.

If only everyone was as easily identifiable as the veteran pickpocket Broken-Nose Tully, who often complained that his damaged beak always gave him away.

“It is a bad thing to judge by appearances, and it is not always safe to judge against them,” Byrnes once explained. “Experience of men is always needed to place them right.”

He sometimes included blunt descriptions that would not pass muster today. A con man is said to look “somewhat like a Jew,” a bank burglar “like a Spaniard.” A house sneak was “inclined to be feminine in his actions.”

Most of the featured rogues were underworld all-stars, but a subtle ranking is at play in the gallery, similar to those resulting from the analytics applied to professional sports. Poor sleepy-eyed George Lockwood, alias Cully, was once considered a first-rate burglar, so skilled that he manufactured his own break-in tools. “Of late he has become somewhat dissipated,” Byrnes coldly noted, “and is not rated now as a first-class criminal.”

But even in his dissolute state, Cully would much prefer this harsh assessment than what appears under the name of the good-looking burglar William Beatty: “He is a mean thief, and is called by other thieves a ‘squealer.’”

The detective divided his motley collection of miscreants into categories of expertise: pickpockets here, burglars there. Though some specialties now seem quaint — Oh, where have all the boardinghouse thieves gone? — the book demonstrates how our predatory capacity remains unabated, as does our susceptibility to be easy marks: gulls; suckers; saps. The common internet come-on of foreign dignitaries offering wire-transfer riches in exchange for a little banking help echoes a 19th-century scam recalled in Byrnes’s book:

DEAR SIR: I will confide to you through this circular a secret by which you can make a speedy fortune. I have on hand a large amount of counterfeit notes of the following denominations: $1, $2, $5, $10 and $20. I guarantee every note to be perfect, as it is examined carefully by me as soon as finished, and if not strictly perfect is immediately destroyed. …

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CreditProfessional Criminals of America

‘Stout build’

Kate RyanPickpocket

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CreditProfessional Criminals of America

‘Son of respectable parents’

George Lockwood (‘Cully’) Burglar and Sneak

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CreditProfessional Criminals of America

‘Formerly a minstrel’

Peter Ellis (‘Banjo Pete’) Bank Burglar, Sneak and Highwayman

The perpetrators of these ancient swindles, some of them featured in this gallery, have faces that are faintly familiar at first, but then they seem to grow more and more recognizable. Who are we gazing upon, then, but ourselves?

Consider the challenge posed by Byrnes: “Look through the pictures in the Rogues’ Gallery and see how many rascals you find there who resemble the best people in the country.”

Here is the tall and lanky Ike Vail, in top hat and goatee, a con man known from Maine to California, who had just suckered a gullible Justice of the Peace from Minnesota out of $60. In his photograph, Ike seems slightly offended, even miffed, as if he were being delayed from attending Sunday service.

Here is John Larney, described as a “pickpocket, burglar, etc.” He made his bones as a boy, dressing as a match girl at a large city celebration and somehow making off with more than $2,000. Now, well into his 40s and sporting a dark beard, Larney still could not shake the nickname that recalled his early dabbling in transvestism: Mollie Matches.

Here is the stout Bertha Heyman, “confidence queen,” whose “wonderful knowledge of human nature” had allowed her to separate many men from their savings, and to become accustomed to staying at the finest hotels, “always attended by a maid or manservant.”

Here they are, inhabitants of the New York underworld and, in a way, our forebears. Staring back through time’s sepia cast. Asking us — daring us — to imagine their lives.

Imagine the married couple of Mary and Harry Busby, pickpockets and shoplifters both, at the dinner table, asking each other: And how was your day?

Imagine Broken-Nose Tully, down at some Bowery dive, explaining how he broke it, or Poodle Murphy, recalling the time he relieved a former secretary of the Navy of his watch, or Billy Forrester, telling the story behind the full-rigged ship sailing across his chest.

Maybe even lugubrious Funeral Wells could be convinced to share a tale attesting to his good nature: Perhaps about that time he was watching people disembark from a steamboat, and a man fell into the water. A policeman pulled the victim up with the assistance of Wells, who helpfully put his arms around the man to steady him.

And kindly unburdened the man of eight bucks and a watch.

Dan Barry is a longtime reporter and columnist, having written both the “This Land” and “About New York” columns. The author of several books, he writes on myriad topics, including sports, culture, New York City, and the nation.